Is web scraping for commercial use legal?

I'm building a service that will scrape data from other websites.

Will this break any laws? Can they sue me if they find out? The data we scrape is for internal purposes, not for public consumption.

If your scraping is for commercial purposes then you need to comply with the various terms and conditions for web scrapers -. This is a legal page and not in the same way about search engines and their indexing as the above page, but gives a good idea of what the law says in this area. You don't have to worry about it if the data is only for internal use and within the US. In addition you would be looking at the DMCA which is more complex.

Can websites detect scrapers?

The internet is a treasure chest of information, but what about some of the content that's been left behind?

Web scraping, also known as web spidering or web harvesting, refers to the practice of accessing websites and repurposing the data that is retrieved for a variety of reasons. When websites were first being developed, there was no good way of verifying that content was truly original. But in the past few years, with the proliferation of HTML5 and the ability for developers to better structure their code, web scraping has become a popular and practical tool for developers. In fact, web scrapers can make it much easier for a website to scale and maintain its own content.

Web scraping comes in various forms, depending on the purpose. A site might be scraped for a variety of reasons, such as: Monitoring new content (eg, updating stock prices, new products, and more). Automated site maintenance (eg, webpages are automatically updated once a certain amount of time has passed). For some businesses, the value of capturing large volumes of data through scraping is in-and-of itself. It could help a company create an effective marketing strategy, analyze the quality and value of potential investment opportunities, or even simply stay competitive by providing daily updates.

Websites that are scraped. There are several ways that websites can be scraped. The most popular is to use automated web crawlers or spiders that crawl websites using a wide array of techniques.

These automated scrapers don't require any human interaction or approval to carry out their activities. Some of the more widely used web crawlers are the Google Web Spider and Googlebot, the Bing web spider and Bingbot, the MSN Web Crawler and MSNbot, and the Yandex web spider and Yandexbot. Some other popular web spiders include the Yahoo web spider and Ysearch, and the Baidu web spider and Baidubot.

Automated scrapers can do a lot more than just visit and scrape websites, though. These tools can crawl, spider, and index websites in a way that makes it easy for developers to use the information captured. For example, the Google Web Spider could crawl websites on a variety of devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.